Million-year-old Arctic sedimentary record sheds light on climate mystery, researchers find umassamherst
New research, led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst and published recently in the journalis the first to provide a continuous look at a shift in climate, called the Mid-Pleistocene Transition, that has puzzled scientists. Kurt Lindberg, the paper's first author and currently a graduate student at the University at Buffalo, was only an undergraduate when he completed the research as part of a team that included world-renowned climate scientists at UMass Amherst.
Somewhere around 1.2 million years ago, a dramatic shift in the Earth's climate, known as the Mid-Pleistocene Transition, or MPT, happened. Previously, ice ages had occurred, with relative regularity, every 40,000 years or so. But then, in a comparatively short window of geological time, the time between ice ages more than doubled, to every 100,000 years.
One of the big barriers to understanding the MPT is that very little data exists. The oldest Arctic ice cores only go back approximately 125,000 years. And older sedimentary cores are almost nonexistent, because as ice ages have come and gone, the advancing and retreating ice sheets have acted like enormous bulldozers, scraping much of the exposed land down to bedrock.
However, there is one place in the world, in far northeastern Russia, that is both above the Arctic Circle and which has never been covered by glaciers: Lake El'gygytgyn. This is where the world-renowned polar scientist, Julie Brigham-Grette, professor of geosciences at UMass Amherst and one of the paper's co-authors, comes in., where they drilled a 685.5 meter sediment core, representing approximately the last 3.6 million years of Earth's history.
While the team did not solve the mystery of the MPT, they did make a few surprising discoveries. For example, an
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